Executive Director, Cape Cod Technology Council
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The Red Sox won tonight, this first night that we actually have television reception in years and years.

The cable TV package entered our world because I have a 9-year-old who is baseball mad and wondered why we can't watch baseball games. And so the wallet was opened and the channels arrived.

But watching traditional television with a child who has always had a Web browser in hand, who had a URL at birth, and who considers always-on connectivity to be the only way to go provides a real ah-ha moment on the pragmatics of convergence.

This was mixed media baseball.

Neither of us are exactly experts - we make up for our lack of knowledge with enthusiasm though! And a willingness to use our tools. And so while the television showed the game and the sportscasters yakked away, one of the Macs was also open to Major League Baseball and the Red Sox roster. When number 25 was at bat, my daughter clicked on the roster number to learn that Mike Lowell was born in San Juan and his middle name is Averett.

In the middle of all this third-grader-led exploration, the words "paradigm shift" smacked me between the eyes. It's a notion I've bumped into multiple times this week as I was out and about.

The old notions of linear information consumption aren't part of the world of a kid born in 1997. Convergence isn't a trend - it is just the way the world works.

The old notions of moderated interaction are equally dated. I had an interesting conversation with someone whose child just graduated college. The job search was on. The child posted a resume on Monster ... and the parents shook their heads, no, that's not how it is done. The recruiter contacted the student ... and the parents shook their heads and asked, "Who is this guy you met online?" The phone interviews led to real interviews led to accepted offer. And the parents are still shaking their heads at how different it all is.

In several other similar discussions this week, the topic was summer rentals. And the focus was the diminished role of the real estate agent as the center point of the transaction. Fewer and fewer people even think about looking to a real estate agent for a rental. They just search the Web. Or visit a site like Cyberrentals. Or WeNeedAVacation.com.

Disintermediation isn't just about editors and news - it is at the heart of a paradigm shift in the way we connect everywhere. It is a move away from a single choke point and towards a more free-form way of connecting, one that is decidedly non-linear and that borrows from many media and many forms simultaneously. And it isn't something that is going to happen - it is something that has already happened.

Everyone likes to talk about a "killer app" - the thing that makes a technology a must-have. I think the "killer app" for digital data is the always-on broadband itself. Once the connection is omnipresent it becomes one more utility, one that is used and integrated into everything. There's the shift.

A laptop that connects wirelessly to always-on broadband makes the jump from being a computer to being a sort of just-there all-purpose information container. Why not look up the middle name of every ballplayer who comes up to bat? Why not find a summer rental on Cape Cod or Lake Champlain? Why not post a resume at the same time you're doing both the above? Why not, indeed!

Last fall we visited a household that did not have connectivity. My daughter wanted to make pancakes for breakfast. She opened up her laptop and headed to AllRecipes, which houses her favorite oatmeal applesauce pancake recipe. She was stunned - stunned! - that she couldn't get to her information. She was ready to cook - a very tangible and real world application - and was merging with the on-line world to learn how.

The lines between the "real" and the digital world are blurred. The more we have the utility of broadband there around us, the more they blur.

The path to a job doesn't follow a resume in an envelope. The path to a summer vacation uses Web sites and videos and photos and e-mail and telephone calls all mixed and matched together in one inseparable big picture. Television isn't a one-way viewing experience. It's one form of media input that might be used in combination with many others.